A very merry tale of romance that’s perfect for the holiday season.
A highborn lady must marry outside her class to save her family’s finances in Matthews’ (The Matrimonial Advertisement, 2018, etc.) latest Victorian romance.
Sophia Appersett is an appealing choice for a man looking for a wife. She’s smart, beautiful, sensible, and has what’s seen as the proper pedigree. Edward “Ned” Sharpe is an eligible bachelor—a self-made man with a substantial fortune but an unfortunate lack of experience in dating nobility. Ned follows poor advice in a gentleman’s etiquette book and manages to appear sullen, staid, and altogether disinterested in Sophie. As a result, she assumes that they have nothing in common and makes a move to end their courtship. But then Sophie catches a glimpse of the man beneath the mask and realizes that perhaps Ned feels things more deeply than she suspected. She proposes that they try to speak honestly with each other and encourages Ned to bring his parents to the Appersetts’ estate in Derbyshire over the holidays. Matthews includes all the required elements of a cozy English Christmas and a classic Victorian love story. Ned is the strong, silent type, and Sophie is predictably unaware of her own appeal; their budding romance is challenged by external forces, not the least of which are their respective parents: Sophie’s father is determined to modernize his estate and has spent both his daughters’ dowries in the quest for advancement, while Edward’s mother visibly disapproves of Sophie and her perceived snootiness. Yet the spirit of the season wins out, and the couple’s future is never really in doubt. Matthews’ novella is full of comfort and joy—a sweet treat for romance readers that’s just in time for Christmas. As in her previous historical romance novels, Matthews addresses hot topics in Victorian society; this time around, the theme is adaptation, as Sophie invites members of differing social classes to the Christmas celebration: “We’re part of the modern age,” Sophie tells her sister. “We must change along with it or be left behind in the dust.”
A very merry tale of romance that’s perfect for the holiday season.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9990364-7-1
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Perfectly Proper Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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